[Raymond Hettinger]
Instead of an explicit type check, it may be better to wrap the interpolation step in a try/except.
Problem with this approach: the interpolation is done at .get() time, so any exception raised would be far from the culprit, .set().
Ideally, the docs should discourage further non-string uses
My doc patch makes clear that non-string uses don't work with interpolation & file output.
and advise that ConfigParser will be string only for Py3.0.
Are there any other Python 3.0 advisories in the docs now? Seeing as how there's no definite schedule or plan for Python 3.0, indeed it's "a hypothetical future release" (PEP 3000), that may not be a precedent we want to set. In any case, I don't know that ConfigParser *should* be declared string-only at all. Docutils uses it only to read config files; the non-string values come from interpreting those values. It's quite convenient to plug the interpreted values back into the ConfigParser dicts and use those. -- David Goodger http://python.net/~goodger